A stress dream about runDisney? Sure, done it a bunch. A stress dream about Disney dining reservations? Now we’re building on the medium!
Let’s back up a moment. I am currently helping Pat’s family plan a WDW trip, and as the acknowledged Disney oracle of the group, I am more or less running the show. This is great, because as a certified Disney Nutter Butter I am well prepared to call some smart shots. But also this is slightly terrifying, because I am calling all the shots. Obviously it is imperative that everyone have a great time, so I better get this right!
MY DISNEY STRESS DREAM ROCK BLOCK
One such thing I need to get right is our dining reservations. Our reservation window opened up recently, and hokey smoke Bullwinkle, did I have some STRESS DREAMS the night before. Multiples in a row! Some of them were about sleeping through my alarm and missing the time slot drop, some were about making the wrong reservation. I had at least one where I took us to the wrong park for the restaurant. My brain likes to treat my Disney plans as if they were something of, y’know, actual import. 😅 Life or death!
“A DIGITAL THUNDERDOME I HAD NO IDEA EXISTED”
I feel pretty confident saying that you, dear reader, are a certified Disney Nutter Butter yourself, since you’re, oh, I don’t know, reading this Disney blog. As such, I’m sure you’re used to the advanced dining reservation rigamarole: ya gotta know when your reservation window opens up, and ya gotta be there ready on the internet at 6am that morning to grab your restaurant spots if you want to be sure you’ll eat anything like when and where you want.
For those outside our bubble (we’re not in a cult, are we? We’re not, right? Right???), the early-morning Running of the Restaurant Reservations can feel kinda crazy. Knowing we had seven days worth of reservations to get during the hot-ticket holiday season, I enlisted backup that included my brother-in-law to help snag those coveted dining slots. As a newcomer to the modern Disney scene, I thought his summation of the experience was excellent:
Travel agents, I’m begging you to lay this gem on your first-time Disney vacationers. What are you currently using as your confirmation email subject line? “You’re going to the magic” or whatever? Psh, boring. “Welcome to a Digital Thunderdome You Had No Idea Existed!” is much fresher.
And more accurate.
A MY DISNEY EXPERIENCE DINING RESERVATION TROUBLE WORKAROUND
Also, my subconscious was kinda on to something: things did go wrong while making my Disney dining reservations, just not in a way it anticipated.
So you know the ten days out rule, right? On the first day of your Disney resort stay you can start making reservations for up to ten days of your vacation, but if you’re staying off property you can only do one day at a time?
Great news! While we are in fact staying on property, My Disney Experience decided not to recognize this, and refused to show me any dates beyond the sixty days out afforded to off-site guests when looking at individual restaurant calendars. I quickly pivoted to the app on my phone; same deal.
I had a very brief panic attack before luckily hitting on an idea: instead of checking the restaurant web pages directly, I went to “My Plans” in My Disney Experience app. There’s a button on the right hand side for dining. Hover your cursor over it and click the “make a reservation” button. By clicking through that, I gained access to all the dates of my stay.
If this happens to you, it’s important to note that you can ONLY maintain access to those dates by working within that screen. Do NOT click off that screen. Once you’ve moved through the party size and date, use your browser finder or scroll through the list to find the restaurant you want and then select a reservation time. If you click through to the restaurant page, the additional dates will blank out for you again.
It does of course beg the question, though: WHY? It’s still doing it, too; via traditional methods I can’t access the full breadth of dates I can through the above hack even a day later.
As fellow Disney devotees, can you believe My Disney Experience glitched out on me like that?
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